Events

29 Dec 2017

Belarusian parliamentary delegation to visit Switzerland on 27 February-1 March

MINSK, 29 December (BelTA) - A Belarusian parliamentary delegation headed by Chairman of the House of Representatives Vladimir Andreichenko will visit Switzerland on 27 February-1 March. This matter was high on the agenda of a meeting between the speaker and Head of the Swiss Embassy Office in Minsk Claude Altermatt, BelTA has learned.

The President of the Swiss National Council (lower house of the Swiss Parliament) extended an invitation to Vladimir Andreichenko to pay an official visit to the country. “This visit will help us significantly deepen the cooperation between the two countries,” the speaker said. The matter is not just about the parliamentary dimension. The Chairman of the House of Representatives proposed to include the issues of trade and economic, credit and investment cooperation into the agenda of the visit.

“We are very interested in the development of investment cooperation, in attracting Swiss investment in Belarus,” Vladimir Andreichenko said. In his view, investors from Switzerland might be interested in entering the EAEU market with high-tech products that could be made in theChinese-Belarusian industrial park Great Stone, the Hi-Tech Park, free economic zones. We are waiting for investors from Switzerland and are ready to provide them with the appropriate working conditions,” the Chairman of the House of Representatives emphasized. The speaker noted that the cooperation will be facilitated by the ordinances on entrepreneurship development and digital economy adopted by the Belarus president at the end of the year. For the time being there are 118 companies with the Swiss capital in Belarus, over 50 of them are joint ventures.

For his part, Claude Altermatt said that the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly summer session in Minsk have an impetus to the development of the bilateral relations. Following the session many Swiss MPs expressed an interest in stepping up cooperation in various fields.

During the meeting, it was stressed that there are no issues on the bilateral agenda that would impede the cooperation between the countries. The inter-parliamentary contacts have recently become system-based. For example, the Belarusian Parliament has set up a friendship group for the cooperation with the Federal Assembly of Switzerland. The Belarusian MPs welcomed the news on the establishment of a similar group in the Swiss Parliament. This happened for the first time in 25 years since the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries. In addition, Belarus and Switzerland have intensified the cooperation in international organizations, including the OSCE, the Inter-Parliamentary Union.